Summoned

WE’RE SUMMONED to the Pub; My Good Lady’s legal eye is required to inspect some documents.

So we swing by PD’s house and collect him, and we join Little B, Al the gardener, Mr P the music teacher and one or two others and for once it’s a bit like old times in the Geriatrics’ Corner.

“There’s going to be a séance here, soon,” says Gaz with a rueful smile.

There’s a general local consensus that this old coaching inn is haunted – by whom or what isn’t clear though. Seems that the staff now wants to try to get to the bottom of the mystery and have clubbed together to employ the local Madame Arcati to do her thing.

I have to say I’m a little sceptical about such things myself; to me it would be odd if in building of this age it didn’t have strange noises and cold draughts in it’s dark corners. The place simply reeks of history. No wonder people feel the odd shudder.

Mind you, this said, there’s a seat in the Geriatrics’ Corner that the locals tend to avoid sitting in. It’s known as the dead man’s place and it is associated with serious, even fatal misfortune to any who sit there.

Strangers, unaware of the seat’s significance, often sit on it – and I must say it always strikes me as a little odd; there’s something not quite right about it. I have to resist the impulse to warn them that they shouldn’t be there.

I do use the place myself, sometimes, but it's always with a self-reminder not to be superstitious.

On the other hand, maybe it's unwise for a man of my age to be tempting providence...